


Queen of Nowhere

by MarsFlameSniper



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Depression, Gen, Identity Issues, Memory Alteration, New Dangan Ronpa V3 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-30 22:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12662928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarsFlameSniper/pseuds/MarsFlameSniper
Summary: To the victor go the spoils. Life after Danganronpa.Spoilers for chapter 2 and for the final twist of the game/chapter 6.





	Queen of Nowhere

Kirumi Tojo lets nothing show on her face during the Class Trial. Not doubt, not fear, not anger, not relief. Inside she is tumultuous, especially as suspicion for Ryoma’s death is briefly thrown her way, but on the surface, her face remains calm.

As she refutes the evidence thrown her way and successfully manages to shift the blame for murder onto another of her classmates, she feels bloody satisfaction. One by one, the people she has been trapped with turn on each other. The air is thick with suspicion and doubt, and as the de facto leader of Japan, it hurts, seeing people that she has been charged to protect lose themselves to despair. But she quashes that sorrow, knowing that her duty is to the nation and that she must escape.

No hint is given as to her thoughts as the buttons to vote are pressed, most suspicion falling back on to Himiko for the murder. As the cheerful voice of Monokuma echoes across the trial grounds-

“You’ve got that wrong folks!”

-and a spotlight falls on her as the blackened, she acknowledges none of her shocked classmates.

“Kirumi! Why?!”

“How could you?”

“Oh crap, we guessed it wrong!”

Their shouts mean nothing to her as she calmly turns her back. Monokuma is already talking about the punishment they’ll face, and the accusations and curses turn into pleas. But still, she does not look, instead making her way back to the elevator. Back to her nation. Back to Japan.

Once inside, she spares them one last look. Sees the naked desperation on their faces while Monokuma and his kubs cackle with glee. Shuichi looks physically ill, his hands shielding his face. Gonta is weeping, as though he understands something terrible is about to happen but he doesn’t know why. Kokichi’s expression is as blank as her own, but he does not try to meet her eyes the way that Maki does. The taciturn girl is all rage now, and she hisses something in her direction that Kirumi does not hear. Red lights burst to life across the room as the elevator begins its shuddering journey back upwards, and a set of steel doors slam shut, blocking their fates from view.

The screaming starts.

Shrieks of terror, some of loathing, all eventually cut off one by one as the elevator continues to rise until finally, silence. But still, Kirumi does not let her expression falter, even for a second. Would that there had been another way for her to leave this place. One that didn’t involve the sacrifice of people she’d grown fond of. But needs must, and her calm expression stays true.

Until the doors open and it’s all blown to hell. The bloom of a camera flash bursts before her eyes as soon as she can see the courtyard, and in her momentary blindness, her expression drops as her ears take in the sheer level of noise before her. There are people, no, reporters, dozens of them. Each and every one calling her name, demanding her attention, and she is well aware that the bewilderment she feels is being displayed on thousands of television screens through the nation. What she doesn’t understand is why.

A practiced neutral expression is forced back onto her face and she steps forward to greet the press. They had somehow been alerted to their whereabouts and this was their rescue, she was sure of it. A shame they hadn’t arrived ten minutes earlier, and come to think of it, she couldn’t see any police-

A jovial man in a gaudy suit and horn rimmed glasses bounds up to meet her, and before she can speak, a microphone is thrust into her face.

“Here you have it!” he says, his smile seeming far to wide for her to comprehend as he addresses the reporters, “the “blackened” and winner of the 53rd season of Danganronpa, our very own ‘Ultimate Maid’, Kirumi Tojo-san!”

All at once is the sound of cheering, though from where she doesn’t understand until the ground literally opens up on either side of her, and rows and rows of seats ascend from below. There is a screaming, clapping audience before her in less time than it would take her to snap her fingers, and it’s all she can do not to black out from the bizarre turn the situation has taken. The sounds and the lights take on a surreal mutedness as she focuses on the microphone in front of her. The man holding it is gesturing towards her, but whatever he is saying slides through her ears like mud.

Her hands begin to shake, a bead of sweat drips from her brow and her eyes dart from one individual to the next. All are bursting with excitement and for the first time in her life, Kirumi feels as tho ugh she’s missed out on something very, vitally, important. Without a second thought, she grabs the microphone from in front of her face and brings it to her lips, the applause and elation around her dying down instantly in the face of her potential address.

All she, Kirumi Tojo, Ultimate Maid and acting President of Japan can manage, is a small

“What’s going on?”

and the courtyard explodes with noise once again.

* * *

 

One week after her ‘victory’, and the unexpectedly early season finale of the 53rd season of Danganronpa had aired in front of the nation; her interview is still being shown on TV.

It was a stopgap really, Team Danganronpa’s producers had explained to her, given that the game had ended so soon into its run. They’d needed to fill the remaining season’s slots with _something_.

Frankly, she’s sick of seeing it. Sick of seeing the brave face she’d tried to put on even as her world had crumbled around her. Sick of hearing that she was not, in fact, the Ultimate Maid, nor was she in the position of power she’d thought she was (and hadn’t the audience gotten a good laugh out of that? Imagine! This girl thought she was the Prime Minister!), she was merely an ordinary high school girl from Wakayama who’d auditioned for the nation’s favourite reality show and won.

The utter heartbreak she’d felt at having her life being torn down and rebuilt in the space of a 45 minute programme was still difficult to comprehend.

Even now, as she watches the playback on the TV in Team Danganronpa’s squalid little break room, she can see where it starts to unfold.

_“So…I was never an Ultimate level student?”_

_The interviewer laughs and the audience laugh along with him._

_“Nope! That was clever behind-the-scenes staging from our team to make you all think you had Ultimate talents!”_

A twitch of the index finger of her right hand.

_“Those motive videos…”_

_“Edited together with top of the line software! Stay tuned at home to find out just how we made the magic happen!”_

Hurried blinks against the gaudy, brightly lit set.

_“And the people I was with, the other students. They all died? That was all real?”_

_“Yes indeed! We provided the locations, the motives and the means for murder, and you all provided yourselves!”_

A slight hitch of tension in her shoulders.

A contract had been unceremoniously thrust at her after the interview, and in her own, looping hand, Kirumi had seen her signature. Someone had explained to her that she was required to re-read the terms, since the memory re-writing processes they’d employed would likely mean that she would be unaware of the exact conditions in which she’d applied.

It turned out that not only had she consented to participating in a televised murder game, she had also agreed to have her memories altered, with the explicit understanding that her original memories may never return, and that the procedure could cause psychological damage in the long term. In addition, she’d apparently signed away rights to her image for at least a year after the show’s final episode had aired, though she was under no obligation to return for the next season.

That, and various other clauses, culminated in her current living situation. It was apparently unusual for a season to end so early into its run-

_“How does it feel to have won the killing game after only two Class Trials Kirumi-san?”_

_She doesn’t know what to say. Apparently used to dealing with shell-shocked murderers, the interviewer continued._

_“If you recall folks, only three other seasons have ended with a blackened escaping punishment before Trial three, and only one of those participants won the game in their first Trial!”_

-but her contract even had provisos for that too. She was to stay at Team Danaganronpa’s headquarters until the projected end of the season, four weeks from now. A cheque had been presented to her at the end of her interview, which she had taken with numb fingers, the value of which would be transferred to her once she left. Food would be provided at no expense, and she could go anywhere in the building.

Mostly, she kept to her room. On occasions such as today, she’d venture out into the break room, or to the cafeteria, but the sight of so many people, people who had helped to engineer the deaths of fifteen people, meant she never stayed out for very long.

Today, the break room had been empty. Most of the staff who remained after production had shut down were dealing with the preparations that would need to be made for the next season. That suited Kirumi just fine. On days when the break room was full and various members of the Team came and went as they pleased, it was an inevitability that Kirumi would become overwhelmed by what she had come to refer to has her compulsion.

It was an after-effect of whatever had been done to her to make her think she had an Ultimate talent. Around people, around the messes they made and the demands they projected, unconsciously or otherwise, she began to fall back on old habits. The urge to tidy the rooms, to clean and mop and serve the food, to process their every request and tirelessly complete them to perfection…these weren’t the habits of Kirumi Tojo from Wakayama, whose biggest concern before her application was that her grades at school weren’t as high as she’d like, and who didn’t really care about doing the dishes straight away because they’d still be there in a few hours. These were the sick things they’d implanted into her brain.

That Kirumi Tojo from Wakayama had consented to this is another matter entirely. What matters to her is that she’s not that figure they’d made her out to be.

But sometimes it’s so hard.

It’s as though she is slowly cracking down the middle. She sees people managing tasks, crating rubbish, requiring food, and the urge to just _do it all take it all on it’s what you’re here for you’re the Ultimate Maid after all_  almost breaks her in two.

She often sits, paralyzed, numb to the activity around her. Locked in a battle of wills against her own impulses. Against muscle memory she barely remembers building. Even when she cleans her own room, she feels a confusing mixture of shame and satisfaction. It often ends with her stood for hours at a time, completing and re-completing the last task she has set herself until she’s weak from exhaustion.

At night, she doesn’t dream. She’s not sure if that has anything to do with the various tools that have played around in her brain, because she'd killed people and she’s sure her subconscious should have some opinions on that.

* * *

 

 A knock on her door one week before she’s due to leave surprises her. The Team had all been nice, but blandly so, obviously unsure of how to treat her in the wake of her victory, so she’s genuinely unsure of who could want to see her.

“Come in,” she says, sitting up from where she’d been lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling.

It’s a team member she doesn’t know, and he looks rather as if he’d like to be anywhere else. Reflexively, she offers him tea, realizing her compulsion has gotten the better of her as he shoots her a confused look and instead holds out a small cardboard box.

As she takes it, he tells her “this was supposed to be given to you after your interview Kirumi-san. You can play it in any of the computers here at our headquarters.”

And without waiting for any questions she may have, or even for her to open the box, he departs.

The box contains a DVD case, and Kirumi feels her mouth go dry as she looks at the title on the spine: Audition 0530827 ‘Tojo, Kirumi’.

This was her. The girl she’d felt creeping back into her thoughts the longer she spent away from the Academy for Gifted Juveniles. The girl who had consented to let these media men play god in her brain. The girl she isn’t sure if she hates or not.

She’d felt pieces of her slowly asserting themselves over the weeks. Slight breaks in the practiced pronunciation that felt almost as natural as breathing some days. Unseemly slouches in her posture. A newly aggravating tendency to worry at her bottom lip.

All those things and more started with the disk in the palm of her had right now, and for the first time since she had stumbled out of a locker and into hell all those weeks ago, Kirumi feels fear.

Against her better judgement, she stumbles from her room, heading to the nearest set of offices she can find. No one looks up at her presence, and she finds an unoccupied computer easily. Plugging a small set of earphones into the screen, she takes the disk from its case with shaking fingers and slides it into the machine.

The video starts, and she can’t stop the sharp breath sucked in through her teeth as she sees herself. She’s sat down, fingers wound together so tightly her knuckles are white, she doesn’t make eye contact with the camera for more than a few seconds. There’s a faded black headband nestled amongst her silvery hair, the bow half-torn and hanging limply on one side.

_“All right,”_ A voice from behind the camera says, and Kirumi watches in awe as her past self actually jumps at the sound.

_“First of all, can you tell us your name please?”_

_“Kirumi Tojo.”_

_“Alright Kirumi-san, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you want to be part of Danganronpa.”_

_“W-well, I attend Milky Way High School, I have two sisters who are both older than I am, I enjoy classical music and I dislike foreign languages. The reason I want to be part of Danganronpa…”_

Leaning forwards in her seat, Kirumi clicks the volume up as high as she can.

_“The reason I want to be part of Danganronpa is because I want to show people that there’s more to me than just the girl they see in class. I want them to be in awe of the girl they laugh about behind their backs, or the girl who usually gets bad scores on tests. I want them to see me as someone capable of doing great things.”_

_“Alright, so you want to be someone pretty amazing then, eh? Well there’s no better way to be amazing in Danganronpa than by winning it all. So how do you think you’d win, Kirumi-san? Would you kill someone?”_

_“Yes. I think I’d want to come up with a murder that really confuses people. You can do so many things to a body to hide the kinds of injuries it’s obtained, or its time of death. Something like that can really put on a good show.”_

_“Sounds good! So, you wouldn’t be interested in playing the hero then?”_

_“No…most of the heroes from previous seasons ended up being really bland and generic, even if they had exciting talents. I’d want to be someone with more presence than that.”_

_“Okay. This is all interesting so far. One last question though: what would you like your Ultimate Talent to be?”_

_“I’d want something that really stands out, that sets me apart. Something like the ‘Ultimate Motorcyclist’, or maybe the ‘Ultimate Acrobat’. You usually have people on the show with really wild personalities and Talents, I’d want something like that.”_

_“I think we may have a few ideas that would suit you Kirumi-san. Something to put you in a real leadership position. How would you feel abut that?”_

The girl on the screen actually has a gleam in her eyes as she nods in excitement, and Kirumi feels both disappointment and disgust in equal parts wash over her.

She’d wanted to be someone respected. Someone well-liked. Someone who could lead. And now here she sat, in charge of nothing. She’d killed the only people who had ever felt something like respect for her, and all she had to show for her efforts was an urge to make everyone else happy. Less Ultimate Maid, more Ultimate Doormat.

Stopping the video, she yanks the disk from the computer and puts it back inside its case. There’s an urge to break it in two, or to throw it out of a window, just anything at all to get this girl she barely knows back out of her life and in the past where she clearly belongs.

But she does none of those things. Instead the DVD case is pushed to the very back of her nightstand’s empty drawer while Kirumi tries to forget she ever saw it.

She doesn’t dream that night either. but nor can she see anything but the smile of the girl on the video behind her eyelids when she tries to sleep.

* * *

 

Soon after, her ‘contract’ with Team Danganronpa runs out, and for the first time in what feels like forever, she’s free to go wherever she wants. Her winnings (a frankly obscene amount that make her feel sick when she thinks about them) have been transferred into her bank account and she uses them to rent a small, one bedroom apartment in Fukui. The thought of going back home to Wakayama had crossed her mind, but she can’t stand the thought of returning to her family. To a mother and father she barely knows, to two sisters she hadn’t even remembered until her past self had mentioned them. To a house full of people who’d see her as a murderer. A maid. A winner.

She tries to tell herself that it’s not cowardice. That she’s not running away. That she’s faced worse situations than this. But the fact that all of those situations had been fabricated constructs in the minds of a team of producers send her carefully constructed arguments crashing down again.

She also has school to consider. Her winnings mean that she won’t ever have to hold down a job in her life if she doesn’t want to, but she also doesn’t want to let her mind stagnate. Her grades had apparently been just as poor as she remembered them to be, on investigation, and some part of her dreads going back to the stress and tedium of school life, even if another part of it welcomes the challenge. The two feelings collide without pause and she delays so much with her application that the new school year starts without her. It’s just one of many frustrating impasses that keep cropping up the more she remembers of her old life.

It almost seemed as if her Ultimate Maid persona had been designed to exist entirely at odds with her old self, and while it made for good entertainment, it made living painful and tedious. Soon her days consist of little more than they had in the Danganronpa building. She wakes, lies in bed and stares at the ceiling, tries to ignore her need to rid the apartment of the growing layer of dust and grime settling over it, and finally, sleeps. She’d condemned twelve people to death, and killed a thirteenth, so that she could lie in her bed and try to ignore how it felt to be alive.

Her skin grows sallow, her voice rough with disuse and dehydration. Leaving the apartment to buy food becomes a trip made on necessity alone…she feels the eyes of her neighbors on her all the time. They judge without pause, looking at the girl who’d thought herself a leader and finding her severely wanting. Soon her bones begin to show through her skin, knuckles and tendons tense like the wire they’d strung Kaede up with, and she wonders if the other girl would be disappointed in her too.

Then again, Kaede had also volunteered to be part of a killing game, so who knew?

Some time later, weeks, months perhaps, a letter comes through the door. The appearance of it startles Kirumi so much that she can’t quite process what to do. Her days had blurred together so much that this one little anomaly felt like a sudden thunderstorm.

There’s a familiar mark on the corner of the envelope. A red eye. Team Danganronpa. With trembling hands, she tears it open, reading the letter contained inside.

It was an invitation to join the 54th season of Danganronpa as last year’s winning contestant. A new season with everything to play for once again. She’d need to re-sign her contract if she wanted to join, and re-consent to the mind-altering mechanisms of the Team.

Parts of her are screaming to refuse. To tear up the letter and pretend she never saw it. Another part of her is telling her accept, to play it right this time and become something even greater than she’d already become. A third, smaller part is telling her that if she tears up that letter, she’d need to separate out the paper and plastic parts of the envelope and put them each in different rubbish bins.

The third voice is the one she listens to, and that makes the decision easy.

* * *

 

Darkness.

Only darkness.

…and metal?

Raising a hand, Kirumi Tojo pushes open a door and stumbles from a locker, landing ungracefully on the cold hard floor below. To her left is a similar sound, the thud of a body hitting the floor and a quiet “ooof!” of surprise.

Another girl has landed next to her, short with dark hair in a traditional cut. She is rubbing her nose with tears in her eyes, and Kirumi pushes herself off the floor, offering the girl a hand. Even as she stands, Kirumi can see that she towers above the other girl. A strange instinct to protect this girl washes over her, and without thinking, she speaks.

“Hello, my name is Kirumi Tojo. What’s yours?”

Sniffling, the girl looks up, scrubbing her nose with the back of her hand.

“Koyomi Ito, it’s nice to meet you.”

Inclining her head, Kirumi looks around the room they’ve found themselves in. It’s a classroom, one that looks as though it hadn’t seen students in quite a while. There are weeds everywhere and the desks are rotted and broken.

“Hey…”Koyomi says shyly, pulling Kirumi’s arm, “do you….also have an Ultimate Talent?”

Raising an eyebrow, Kirumi considers the question. Everything within her is screaming that yes, she does. But nothing is telling her what it is.

“I think so.” She says finally, “but you’ll have to forgive me: while I’m certain I have a talent…what it is, I’m not sure.”

Koyomi nods, and introduces herself as the Ultimate Birdwatcher. Smiling at her new companion, Kirumi heads for the classroom door.

“Well, now that we’re acquainted, shall we proceed? I’d like to explore this place a little further and see if anyone else is here.”

Looking less than thrilled with the idea, Koyomi hesitates and with a chuckle, Kirumi takes her hand.

“Don’t worry,” she says, smiling “whatever happens, I’ll keep you safe.”


End file.
